Associate Professor in Art History and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, Cherise Smith specializes in American art after 1945, especially as it intersects with the politics of identity, race, and gender. Her book, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Duke University Press, 2011), examines the negotiation of identity by women artists in performance art who strategically take-on the characteristics and manners of a racial, ethnic, and gender “other”. Her essays have appeared in Art Journal, African Arts, and exposure. Her awards include a Getty Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship, and Research Fellowship at W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research at Harvard University. She has worked in the curatorial departments of the Art Institute of Chicago, the De Young Museum, and the Saint Louis Art Museum among others institutions.